Fireside Politics

Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920-1940

Douglas B. Craig

Publication Year: 2000

In Fireside Politics, Douglas B. Craig provides the first detailed and complete examination of radio's changing role in American political culture between 1920 and 1940—the medium's golden age, when it commanded huge national audiences without competition from television. Craig follows the evolution of radio into a commercialized, networked, and regulated industry, and ultimately into an essential tool for winning political campaigns and shaping American identity in the interwar period. Finally, he draws thoughtful comparisons of the American experience of radio broadcasting and political culture with those of Australia, Britain, and Canada.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

List of Maps, Illustrations, Figures, and Tables

Acknowledgments

Research for this book was supported by grants from the Australian Research
Council, the Australian National University (ANU), and the Australian
Academy of the Humanities. Sabbatical residences at the Institute of Governmental
Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the Department
of History at the...

Introduction

This book explores radio’s influence on interwar political institutions, debate,
and theory. Radio emerged during the first two decades of the twentieth century
in the wake of the telegraph and the telephone. Unlike its predecessors,
however, radio’s ability to transmit information instantaneously was not restrained
by the need for poles...

Abbreviations

Part I: Making the Medium, 1895–1940

1 The Radio Age: The Growth of Radio Broadcasting, 1895–1940

When James Rorty looked back in 1934 on the beginnings of the radio age,
he remarked that “radio broadcasting came into the world like a child born
too soon and bearing the birthmark of a world culture which may never be
achieved.” Radio had emerged amidst high hopes of a new age of enlightenment
and communication. Yet it had...

2 Radio Advertising and Networks

A wide variety of organizations owned the first broadcasting stations. Of the
corporate broadcasters, radio and electrical manufacturers had the most obvious
interest in fostering broadcasting. Stations such as Westinghouse’s
KDKA gave people who bought radios something to listen to. Other early
broadcasters used their stations to publicize their products or services, and
many businesses were attracted...

3 Regulatory Models and the Radio Act of 1927

Broadcasting posed a number of challenges to accepted notions of governance
and regulation in the United States. Although it appeared to be inherently interstate
in its scope, radio also promised to have profound effects upon local
communities and individual sensibilities. It also raised questions about freedom
of speech, equality of access, and acceptable limits of private control over
public information. Exploration...

4 The Federal Radio Commission, 1927–1934

Republican Representative Grant M. Hudson of Michigan voted reluctantly
for the Radio Act of 1927. He objected to the creation of another commission,
because “we are now . . . hobbled and controlled by bureaus and commissions.
. . . Is there to be no end? Are we to come to the point where 50
per cent of the population will be laboring to support the other 50 per cent
in Federal and State Government...

5 A New Deal for Radio? The Communications Act of 1934

At the end of January 1933 Eugene Coltrane of the National Committee on
Education by Radio (NCER) wrote Senator William Borah, one of the FRC’s
most vehement critics, an eight-page letter “on the general subject of radio.”
Coltrane put forward a sweeping indictment of the ways in which broadcasting
had degenerated under the FRC. Unspecified “evil influences” had infiltrated
the airwaves; advertisements...

6 The Federal Communications Commission and Radio, 1934–1940

"Whatever the cause,” Charles Siepmann wrote in 1950, “the fact is irrefutable
that, since its inception in 1934, the FCC has used its powers with a discretion
that, except on rare occasions, has pleased the industry, as it has provoked
the dismay and indignation of radio’s more exacting critics.” Others have been
less polite. V. O. Key noted in 19...

Part II: Radio and the Business of Politics, 1920–1940

7 The Sellers: Stations, Networks, and Political Broadcasting

In October 1922 the Wireless Age announced that broadcasting, then only two
years old, had created a new political era. Radio provided Americans with a
new form of communication that would bypass the partisanship of newspapers
to create a direct bond between voters, candidates, and office holders.
Already broadcasting’s potential had...

8 The Buyers: National Parties, Candidates, and Radio

At the end of March 1922 Republican Senator Harry S. New of Indiana was
in a dilemma. While he was in Washington, deliberating over the Naval Disarmament
Treaty, his opponents within the Indiana GOP were at work
against him. New faced a formidable opponent, former Senator Albert Beveridge,
in the forthcoming primary...

9 The Product: Radio Politics and Campaigning

Charles Merriam of the University of Chicago was the foremost political scientist
of the interwar period. He published 13 books, including updated editions
of his classic work The American Party System, during the 1920s and
1930s. The 1922 edition of that book did not even mention radio, but within
seven years Merriam had become a convert to the political power of radio.
His second edition, published in...

10 The Consumers: Radio, Audiences, and Voters

“Outside the tight frame house, there’s a northeast gale blowing,” John Dos
Passos wrote in 1934. The house was full of “dryness, warmth, and light,” but
was also “a lonely tangle of needs, worries, desires: how are we going to eat,
get clothes to wear . . . raise our children, belong to something, have something
belong to us?” After dinner...

Part III: Radio and Citizenship, 1920–1940

11 Radio and the Problem of Citizenship

Brave pronouncements of a new age of citizenship accompanied the spread
of radio broadcasting after 1920. Radio might form new connections between
the individual and the community to strengthen those dangerously stretched
by urbanization, industrialization, cultural diversity, and regionalism. Workers
might better understand their employers through radio; the drift away
from the churches might be arrested...

12 Radio at the Margins: Broadcasting and the Limits of Citizenship

Early in the 1920s Maurice Bradford thanked Harry P. Davis, Vice-president
of Westinghouse, for some radio components. “Ye Gods! A Wonderful, wonderful
present! I’ll be radio frequencying all night for the next three months!”
Although he was “shut off from everything” and isolated from his family,
Bradford could now go to baseball...

13 Radio and the Politics of Good Taste

Broadcasters during the 1920s and 1930s were convinced that they would play
a central role in the interaction between the nation and its citizens. But such
aspirations were neither socially nor politically neutral. The broadcasters used
their influence to guide citizenship in directions that buttressed the existing
balance of power within American...

Conclusion

In retrospect it is clear that 1940 marked the end of an era in radio history.
World War II closed twenty years of peacetime development of the broadcasting
industry, and imposed new responsibilities and restrictions upon it.1
In 1941 a reinvigorated FCC disrupted the cosy regulatory atmosphere of the
interwar years by forcing NBC...

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